Position in chronology
MSVO 3, 69
About this tablet
This is a small, badly worn proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from Uruk-period Mesopotamia (roughly the late 4th millennium BCE), one of the very earliest forms of writing in the world. It appears to be a tally of commodities or livestock — cattle (GU4), a category or group termed KISZ, possibly a jar (DUG), and other counted goods — recorded with archaic numeral notations rather than connected sentences. Tablets like this were the bookkeeping backbone of early urban temple or palace economies, tracking who received or delivered how much of what, long before writing was used for literature or law.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This fragment is an ancient inventory list, not a story or letter. One line records 5 units connected with cattle (oxen); another records 4 units under a category called kisz. Further down the tablet lists what may be a jar and something described by the term 'zag' (an edge or boundary), followed by a count of 5 measures of something now lost. The tablet breaks off before the entries can be fully understood, but the final surviving line seems to close with a term for 'horn' or a related object, a possible sky or institutional marker (AN), and the qualifier 'great/large,' alongside a numeral notation. In short: a scribe's running count of goods — cattle, containers, and other commodities — most of which is now illegible because the tablet is broken and worn.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 5(N01) units, GU4 (ox/cattle) [...] 4(N01) units, KISZ (category label) [...] , [...] [...] , [...] DUG (jar?) [...] , [...] ZAG (side/boundary?) [...] 5(N14) units, [...] [...] , [...] , [...] SI (horn?) AN(?) GAL (great/large) |1(N58).BAD|
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
[...] 5(N01)# , GU4 [...] 4(N01)# , KISZ [...] , [...] [...] , [...] DUG~a#? [...] , [...] ZAG~a# [...] 5(N14)# , [...] [...] , [...] , [...] SI# AN#? GAL~a# |1(N58).BAD~a|#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — MSVO 3, 69. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Land Berlin, Berlin, Germany (P005380) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.